Dr. Harald Osel works in the global oil and gas industry and has written four remarkably detailed volumes on the industry he knows and loves. We designed covers for all four volumes of his magnum opus and typeset the text. Every aspect from exploration to extraction and transport is covered, along with issues of environmental preservation and clean energy. Published by Aurora Publishing. We maintained common design elements for al four covers and used images that reflected the topic covered by the specific volume. Typeface used on the covers: Proxima Nova (various weights and widths).
Why Vary Ebook Pricing?
One of the distinctive aspects of ebook publishing is the willingness of authors and publishers to vary book pricing. Some of this may be an attempt to find the ideal price for a given book, but others are following a more sophisticated playbook, a little like the strategies employed by airlines with ticket sales. Kindle itself has Kindle Countdown Deals, though there are built in limits to the use of this particular tool. PublishDrive makes the following observation:
“Writing an ebook is hard. Pricing it should not be harder. Ebook pricing, however, can often feel like a maze without exits. It is easy to get lost or confused. With the following ebook pricing guide we would like to help beginners and seasoned publishers to find their way out.”
And WriteHacked has a long post on the topic spelling out all of the options and reasoning behind them
Advice for Independent Authors
Independent authors are often preyed upon by publishers. Writing a book is hard but a relatively linear task — write > edit> proofread, but the modern landscape of publishing and promotion is wide open, with a myriad possible strategies and pitfalls. Unsurprisingly, many authors find the prospect of self-managing their book overwhelming and sign up with ‘vanity’ presses. Many of these presses over-promise and under-deliver. With the amount of money they spend on signing up with a publisher, authors could have achieved a great deal pursuing their own promotional plan. There are many resources online to assist with this planning. Jane Friedman is also very helpful.
Here is a good roundup of Australian resources. The Queensland Writers Centre has some useful advice.
Independent publishing is hard, but it can be very rewarding. Many of the possibilities are very low cost, your reach is potentially global, an amazing thing in itself.
WorkingType Design has compiled a useful hints booklet for authors, downloadable here.
Directly Importing Author Comments and Corrections into a Book
Most books are set up in Adobe InDesign. Very few independent authors subscribe to Indesign, and therefore have no capacity to directly edit or correct their own book. Typically they will supply a list of corrections to the designer. However, Adobe have recently added an interesting feature to InDesign that will at give authors the chance to at least annotate the PDF proof, and have the designer import the PDF (and annotations) directly into Indesign (provided the comments are properly made). This should increase the speed and accuracy of book proofing and streamline the workflow. An article on the process from Adobe.
POD Book Sizes from KDP and Ingram Spark
Most independent authors opt to upload their print-on-demand book files to Kindle Direct Publishing (formerly Createspace) or to Ingram Spark/Lightning Source. Hence, designers tend to choose book sizes that conform to the standard sizes supported by these two providers (the sizes are very similar between the two platforms. The pages that detail the standard sizes for KDP are here, and for Ingram Spark here. For a head to head comparison of the two services, check out this article. Others argue for using both services at once.